The Kosovo events - a subject for a new discussion

From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 09:40:26 +0200 (EET)
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Subject: The Kosovo events - a subject for a new discussion

From: MINELRES moderator  <[email protected]>

Original sender: Alexander Ossipov <[email protected]>

The Kosovo events - a subject for a new discussion


We receive a lot of information and comments about the latest events
in Kosovo. Some governments and NGO's protest against human
rights abuses by the Serbian police. Those protests sometimes not
only seem biased, but actually look as a campaign in favour of
Albanian separatism. Condemnation of the Serbian government is total
and uncompromising, but nobody even mentions that the main cause
of the crisis is the separatist activities and that the authorities deal
with the terrorist underground, not with peaceful civil resistance.
Nobody condemns terrorism and separatism as well as official
Tirana's adventurism. Even no attempts of making such reservations.
We witnessed the same in the similar cases: Karabakh, Chechnia
etc. A double standart of this kind may be deliberate, may be not.
The key problems is who benefits from it. Anyway, I want to avoid
misunderstanding, I do condemn the 'mop-up' operations like that
one in Drenica.

The other problem. Some people interpret territorial autonomy (like
Kosovo's before 1988) as a matter of a 'collective right', not of political
or administrative settlement. This view is not based on any positive
international law, but it is widely spread. Consequently, the promotors
of this view support ethnonationalist claims and ethnonationalist logic.
If a territorial autonomy embraced a certain area defined by its ethnic
composition, the idea of 'belonging' of a territory to a certain group
inevitably emerges.

What do you think about it?

Best wishes.

Sasha Ossipov,

The Memorial Human Rights Centre,
programme officer

Maly Karetny per. 12, Moscow, 103051, Russia
tel 7 095 282 08 16
fax 7 095 209 57 79
e-mail: <[email protected]>

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